After this, Duke Cesare publicly declared that he had killed the Prince of Bisceglia, because the latter had tried to murder him by setting an archer to shoot him silently in the Vatican gardens:—so far Don Paolo Cappello. Monsignor Hans Burchard the Caerimonarius says, that, at eleven o’clock on the night of the fifteenth of July, Prince Don Alonso the husband of Madonna Lucrezia Borgia was found on the steps of St. Peter’s, wounded by assassins in the head, the knee, and the right arm. After the assault, the assassins were escorted by forty knights beyond the City-gate called Porta Pertusa. Prince Don Alonso lived near the Vatican in the palace of the Cardinal of Santa Maria _in Portico_; but, owing to the serious nature of his wounds, he was carried into the pontifical palace, and lodged in a room of the Borgia Tower. When King Don Federigo heard of the attempt upon his nephew, he sent Messer Galieno his own leech to cure him. Later the prince was strangled; and the leeches with a certain hunchback servant were put to the Question in the Mola of Hadrian, and afterwards released as innocent. A chronicle of Pavia of much later date says that Duke Cesare killed Prince Don Alonso at a time when he was in bed with his own wife Madonna Lucrezia. Before examining the divergences of this evidence, it may as well be said that the original despatches of Don Paolo Cappello the Orator of Venice are not attainable. Many years later, a learned patrician of Venice, Don Marino Sanuto, wrote the History of the Venetian Republic from 1496 to 1533 in fifty-six folio volumes. He cited the state-archives, despatches of orators, etc., and his work is marvellously well done: but when all is said, the fact remains that the despatches of Don Paolo Cappello, with those of many others, have been edited by a stranger to the writers, and to the circumstances under which they wrote. Monsignor Burchard held an important office at the Vatican. He was German, and inimical to Borgia. On matters connected with his office of Caerimonarius, _i.e._, the superintendence of public functions, he might speak with some authority: but beyond that he is an inveterate gossip and scandalmonger. In his case, also, it is impossible to know what he really wrote, because the original holograph of his Diarium (with the Diarium of Infessura and other similar works) even now awaits discovery by students of ancient archives.